Radio telescopes now in operation or under construction will be indispensible to scientists wrestling with the big, unanswered questions of 21st-Century astrophysics. That was the conclusion of a wide-ranging scientific meeting held in Charlottesville, Virginia, June 18-21, to mark the 50th anniversary of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is teaming with NASA’s upcoming Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope to allow astronomers to use both the orbiting facility and ground-based radio telescopes to maximize their scientific payoff.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array radio telescope have greatly strengthened the case that supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies may have formed through mergers of smaller black holes.

Astronomers studying dwarf galaxies formed from the debris of a collision of larger galaxies found the dwarfs much more massive than expected, and think the additional material is missing mass that theorists said should not be present in this kind of dwarf galaxy.

Scientists using a high-precision planetary radar technique for the first time have discovered that the innermost planet Mercury probably has a molten core, resolving a mystery of more than three decades.

Brown dwarfs, thought just a few years ago to be incapable of emitting any significant amounts of radio waves, have been discovered putting out extremely bright lighthouse beams of radio waves, much like pulsars.